Bad Cops

A Texas police officer was placed on administrative leave on Friday after he reportedly used a Taser on a 76-year-old man after the suspect had already been forced to the ground.

The Victoria Advocate reported that 76-year-old Pete Vasquez was driving a work-owned vehicle back to his place of business on Thursday when 23-year-old Officer Nathanial Robinson pulled him over for an expired inspection.

Vasquez said that he explained that the car belonged to a car lot, and that the dealer tags made it exempt from having an inspection.

The Washington Post has been running a very good series of investigative reports on how police departments around the nation have been seizing billions of dollars from often innocent citizens without charging them with any crime. That link takes you to the first installment. On the side, near the top, are the links to the other five pieces. It’s time for Congress to address this issue nationally. Somehow, I doubt that Republicans will allow that.

Essentially, that’s the thrust of this NRO article. Most cops are great. But more and more we read stories about some that truly abuse their powers, and the Constitution. Unfortunately, most of these bad cops are never punished. Excuses or rationals are given by Internal Affairs departments, or local and state prosecutors.

A Manassas City teenager accused of â€śsextingâ€ť a video to his girlfriend is now facing a search warrant in which Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors want to take a photo of his erect penis, possibly forcing the teen to become erect by taking him to a hospital and giving him an injection, the teenâ€™s lawyers said.

I guess there’s no criminal activity in Manassas that might be more worthy of spending tax-payer dollars to investigate.

A Queens man who had his stolen car returned to him by the NYPD was pulled over and surrounded by gun-waving cops just months later because they forgot to remove the vehicle from their database, according to a new lawsuit.

When sheriff’s deputy Ramon Charley Armendariz hanged himself, he left behind a house full of questions.

Among the items at his house were a stash of drugs, evidence bags from old cases, hundreds of fake IDs and thousands of his video-recorded traffic stops that were withheld in a racial-profiling case against his boss, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Now, the quest for answers has raised the possibility that a yet-to-be-determined number of his cases could be thrown out and has refocused attention on Arpaio and his department, already under close watch by a federal monitor in the profiling case.

Much more at the link.

I’ll state at the outset that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with profiling. It’s ludicrous for TSA officers to be strip-searching old ladies and Swedes at airports, for instance. Needless to say, I don’t approve of an officer shaking down suspects.

Enoch Clark, 38, is on trial on four felony counts of assault by a police officer and causing great bodily injury.

Clark attempted to arrest Monique Hernandez, 34, Feb. 21, 2012, on suspicion of drunken driving as she was pulling away from her Beaumont home. After she resisted Clarkâ€™s attempts to handcuff her, Clark used his department-issued JPX gunpowder-propelled pepper spray weapon and fired it less than a foot away from her face.

The blast of pepper spray gel sliced her right eye in half, fractured her right orbital bone and severed the optic nerve in her left eye.

More at the link. At least in this case he’s being prosecuted. That doesn’t happen often with bad cops (and almost never, here in Vermont).

â€śDude, we got the wrong guy,â€ť said one officer while placing Johnson in the police car.

â€śSomeone drop the dope in here,â€ť said another officer, joking about how they should plant drugs in Johnsonâ€™s car.

Johnson was ultimately arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and arrest, but after the details of the incident became known, the charges were dropped. Johnson then proceeded to file a federal lawsuit against the officers, and now, he has finally settled with the Seaford Police Department for $270,000.

Until the good ones crush the bad ones, I will never offer support for them. Video at the link.

An off-duty officer with the New York Police Department got drunk Tuesday night and fired his gun 13 times at a complete stranger who was stopped at a traffic light, police said.

Officer Brendan Cronin, 27, has been charged with assault in the first degree after he randomly opened fire on Joe â€śThe Truckâ€ť Felice, 47, while the two were stopped at the light in Pelham, Westchester, the New York Post reported.

Later, he was involved in a stand-off with arresting officers. He’s been released on bail — I’d like to know how THAT was arranged…

Two former Los Angeles County sheriffâ€™s deputies have been charged after allegedly planting firearms at a Los Angeles medical marijuana dispensary to justify making an arrest, the DAâ€™s office announced Wednesday.

Jesus Cesar Martinez, 39, and Anthony Manuel Paez, 32, were charged with one felony count each of conspiracy to obstruct justice and peace officer altering evidence. Martinez was also charged with two counts of perjury and one count of filing a false report.

One by one, five police officers took the witness stand at the Skokie courthouse late last month for what would typically be a routine hearing on whether evidence in a drug case was properly obtained.

But in a “Perry Mason” moment rarely seen inside an actual courtroom, the inquiry took a surprising turn when the suspect’s lawyer played a police video that contradicted the sworn testimony of the five officers â€” three from Chicago and two from Glenview, a furious judge found.

Cook County Circuit Judge Catherine Haberkorn suppressed the search and arrest, leading prosecutors to quickly dismiss the felony charges. All five officers were later stripped of their police powers and put on desk duty pending internal investigations. And the state’s attorney’s office is looking into possible criminal violations, according to spokeswoman Sally Daly.

Details of the case, and video, at the link. Is there anyone in Chicago that ISN’T corrupt?

At least 37 times in the last four years, police officers here have responded to threats with bullets, killing 23 people and wounding 14 others. On Thursday, the Justice Department weighed in with a scathing assessment, accusing the Albuquerque Police Department of a â€śpattern or practice of use of excessive forceâ€ť that routinely violated peopleâ€™s constitutional rights.

Too often, the Justice Department said, the officers kicked, punched and violently restrained nonthreatening people, and seldom were the officers reprimanded. Many of the victims suffered from mental illnesses, and some were disabled, elderly or drunk, the 16-month investigation concluded.

More gory details at the link. This really all points to the militarization of police forces in this country these days.

I was discussing this with someone last week and he (an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran) believes that a lot of it stems from recent veterans becoming police officers after they exit the military. He thinks that many of them maintain the “this is a war zone” mentality and don’t respond properly to non-life threatening situations or know how to diffuse them without simply employing violence or emptying their service weapons into, say, a mentally ill person. He blames it both on poor training by the police academies, and on a mind-set given them when they were in the military and fighting overseas.

A PHILADELPHIA police officer was arrested yesterday for an off-duty incident last fall in which he allegedly drove into a pedestrian - and then threatened to kill the man, shouting a racial slur at him and flashing his gun.

Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriffâ€™s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern Californiaâ€™s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a weekâ€™s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that â€śAll [license plate] data is investigatory.â€ť The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesnâ€™t matter.

This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under â€śgeneral warrantsâ€ť that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.

More at the link. I’m a donor to the EFF as they protect bloggers’ rights.

Started in October of 2002, Alphecca is an occasional blog of OPINIONS by a libertarian, gay gun-nut living in Vermont. Book reviews, politics, gun stuff, other stuff; it’s all here. Your opinions about my opinions are welcome in the comments and as I always say, thank’s for stopping by.